a blog by & for FJVs & friends all about social justice, simple living, community, & spirituality

Category: Simple Living

Many of us feel a lack of self-control around technology and have strong desires to develop healthier relationships with our devices. Luckily, there are dozens of authors, commentators, and individuals who are helping us envision radical new ways of living lives independent of technology, and intentionally with technology.

After hearing about a peer’s commitment to the present moment, I have realized that I too default to sharing about experiences with a clear distinction of “then” versus “now.” I am taking her words as an invitation to practice honesty and truth-telling in the present instead of waiting three months to write you a post about insights on my current experience.

I recently read Sarah E. Stevens’ essay “Care Time” in Disability Studies Quarterly, in which she reflects on how her experiences as a care partner affect her relationship to time. Stevens’ essay got me thinking about the two years I spent as a live-in assistant at L’Arche Heartland. Stevens’ description of care time strongly resonated with my experiences as a L’Arche assistant, but I also noticed some interesting points of divergence between care time and “L’Arche time.”

I left Twitter in February 2018. I had been contemplating a clean break for a while, knowing how much time I spent on that website that I wish was spent elsewhere, and the effect that it was having on the way I thought about the world. Here’s what I learned.

It turns out that grayscaling your screen doesn’t just make your phone boring and less interesting to look at. It also makes your phone’s user interface more confusing and harder to parse with a single glance. Which, thereby, makes me less inclined to spend time on my phone and more inclined to throw my phone across the room and go read or go outside.

I’d like to offer the consideration of simple living as something more than a practice of less. I feel as though my JV house, at least, was remiss in giving simple living it’s due, as a tenet; I believe it has a much wider conceptual scope and a much greater nuance of potential practices than I ever realized.